Mana from the sea: The biological sustainability, institutional economics, and political ecology of fishing quota rights in New Zealand

The depletion of marine fisheries has been a worldwide concern since at least the 1970s, when the spectacular crash of the Peruvian anchovetta fishery reduced the global marine fish catch by over 20 percent. One response has been to create tradable quotas whereby fishers are guaranteed a specific portion of an annually-determined total catch. Recent evidence indicates that these quota systems effectively reduce overfishing, but changing from regulation-based fisheries management to rights-based fisheries management is a contentious political process. Proponents and opponents of changes in fisheries management commonly base their opinions on different biological, social, and economic criteria. As a result, very few tradable quota systems have been implemented anywhere in the world in the last ten years.;This dissertation bridges these different criteria by assessing the effects of the New Zealand Quota Management System (QMS) on the biological sustainability of fisheries, the institutional structure of the fishing industry, and on Maori access to fish resources. Measuring the ecological effects of the QMS in New Zealand begins with the biological sustainability of harvests for target species, a measurement that has been ill-defined to date. A new measurement that looks at inputs (harvest models) and the likelihood of biological sustainability is proposed and applied to the lobster fishery, which appears to be more biologically sustainable under the QMS.;Institutional economics is used to explore the effects of the QMS on coordination and organizational structure within the fishing industry. In the case of the lobster fishery, the industry became more hierarchical under the QMS, and used that structure to aggregate biological data on the fishery and to increase the productivity of the lobster industry. Finally, the Maori involvement in NZ fisheries is explored using political ecology. For Maori, the QMS offered a restitution of traditional access rights and a contradiction. In order to claim traditional access to fish resources as the basis for allocating rights, Maori had to engage in non-traditional, capitalist relations of production.